


A Darkness Shared

by prairiecrow



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Friends to Lovers, Humor, M/M, Romance, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-26
Updated: 2011-08-26
Packaged: 2017-10-23 02:21:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/245213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prairiecrow/pseuds/prairiecrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's amazing what you can hear without words, in the darkness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Darkness Shared

**Author's Note:**

> Set during the middle of the third season, shortly after "Civil Defense".

“I can’t believe she  _bit my ear!_ ” Quark’s wail rang out for the fourth time that evening; Bashir almost winced, but the reaction of the few people still assembled in his bar was one of general disinterest. They were too busy being treated for various injuries of their own by Deep Space Nine’s medical staff: cuts, scratches, and bites, in addition to torn clothing that the doctors and nurses couldn’t really do anything about. The rest of Quark’s patrons, the ones lucky enough not to have been affected by the telepathic aftershock that had driven some of them temporarily sexually insane, had either cleared out on their own or been shepherded away by the security detail; they were Odo’s problem now, so Bashir had put them out of his mind completely.

“Quark,” he said reasonably, applying a dermal regenerator to the last inflamed patch of the Ferengi’s damaged pinna, “you were trying to make love to her on top of the bar — against her will, I might add.”

“She didn’t have to bite me!” Quark sounded acutely aggrieved. The Dabo girl in question, in the process of having scratches treated on her shoulders and sides, had been glaring at him non-stop since the medical team arrived. Bashir suspected that tomorrow morning Quark would have a vacancy to fill: it didn’t look like the young lady had reciprocated her employer’s lustful longings in the least. Not that she was alone. Judging by the various angry and uncomfortable expressions in the various small groups scattered around the ground floor of the club, a number of people had behaved in ways that did not match their conscious expectations of themselves, nor the expectations of their romantic partners.

Bashir sighed under his breath and kept mending. 

It had all started about four hours ago when an ambassador from Liarta IV on her way to a conference on Bajor had decided to have a little fun with her husband in a holosuite — a little sexual fun, more’s the pity. During their amorous encounter her telepathic dampener had failed without her knowledge and the emotions associated with their enthusiastic loveplay had been broadcast to everybody within three hundred yards, much to the consternation and dismay (and in some cases probably secret delight) of the Promenade’s inhabitants. It had taken over half an hour to figure out what was going on, by which time the ambassador had already finished and life on the Promenade had returned to normal, aside from a few flushed cheeks and overly bright eyes.

That had been bad enough, but at least it had been confined to a brief burst of lustful sensations and images. The worst was yet to come. In cases of Liartan telepathy there was a rare phenomenon called “cognitive aftershock” in which the thoughts and emotions initially received set up a wave of more powerful reactions in the minds of those exposed to it. The reaction might be delayed by hours or days, but when it hit it could drive people to act out dramatically — or, in Quark’s case, to jump a Dabo girl at the same moment that some of his patrons turned their attentions to their own objects of desire. All it took was a subliminal attraction to give the wave an access point, although in Quark’s case Bashir doubted the attraction had been all that subliminal, or even particularly well hidden. 

Bashir was fortunate: he’d been in a senior staff briefing and thus had missed the initial telepathic surge. But he’d nevertheless been busy preparing for the aftershock, assembling plenty of hypos loaded up with a complex little chemical cocktail known to alleviate the worst effects within seconds. There’d been plenty of that administered in the last few minutes here at Quark’s, which fortunately was the only Promenade business open at this late hour.

Except...

Bashir frowned, remembering that when he’d been on his way to the Infirmary a couple of hours ago to prepare for the potential onslaught of aftershock cases he’d noticed the lights on inside Garak’s shop, although the doors themselves were closed. The tailor was working late again, probably on that wedding party commission he’d been discussing with varying degrees of enthusiasm and disgust for the last couple of weeks. Had he been on the Promenade during the initial surge? 

“Quark, do you know if Garak was —”

“ _Ow!_ ” The Ferengi swiped irritably at the hand holding the dermal regenerator. Bashir slid it away and back, neatly avoiding the irascible reaction. “Careful!”

“Sorry,” Bashir said without really meaning it. He was almost done. “As I was saying, do you know if Garak was in his shop when the ambassador’s telepathic dampener failed?”

“How should I know?” Having one of the most sensitive parts of his anatomy touched by someone he didn’t want to take to bed evidently made Quark extremely testy. “Keeping track of him’s your job, not mine.”

“Very funny.” And also something of a non sequiter, but Bashir decided to let it pass. No need to annoy Quark any more than he already was. “You’ll be lucky if she doesn’t press charges, you know.”

Quark’s eyes slid to the Dabo girl, who turned her face away and lifted her chin angrily. His smile was the very picture of confident lechery. “Oh, she wants me. I know it. She just wasn’t affected by that ‘aftershock’. This time tomorrow she’ll be remembering me nibbling her lobes and thinking about what she's missing.”

“I’m sure.” Bashir stifled a laugh and made a final pass with the regenerator. “There. You’re done.”

“Thank the Nagus!” He reached up and rubbed his just-healed ear with careful fingertips as Bashir turned to put the regenerator away in his kit. “No offense, Doctor, but I’ll bet you’re lousy in bed. You have all the delicacy of an avarast hornbeast.”

“Fortunately I’m not being judged by Ferengi standards.” He clicked the kit closed and slung its strap over his shoulder, looking around at the rest of the patients in the bar: all of them were under treatment and his presence was no longer required. He decided to go back to the Infirmary and start preparing his report on the incident; the earlier in the morning Sisko had it on his desk, the better. On his way he’d check the tailor’s shop and see if Garak was still there. If the Cardassian was suffering the effects of the aftershock a dose of Bashir’s chemical cocktail would soon put him right.

As he left the bar he heard a burst of angry argument erupt in one corner of the room: a woman almost screaming, a man shouting, a nurse trying to calm them both down. Come tomorrow morning Quark wasn’t the only one who’d have an empty spot in his life to deal with, Bashir reflected. Discovering that your partner had secretly lusted after someone else wasn’t a blow that many relationships could easily weather. That was the real tragedy of this incident, and it was a lingering effect that wouldn’t appear in his medical report. Pondering the various corpses of love he’d left behind, he made his way down the now-deserted Promenade toward Garak’s Clothiers.

The shop was dark, its doors closed and presumably locked for the night. Bashir looked at them for a long moment before tapping his comm badge. “Computer, locate Elim Garak.”

 _“Elim Garak is located in Unit 02-485 on the Promenade.”_

Which was the shop Bashir was standing in front of. Frowning, he approached the doors and touched them carefully; they swung slightly open under his hand. He pushed them open just enough to slip through. 

“Lights.” The system did not respond. Garak had probably overridden it. Shadows confronted Bashir, growing darker and deeper toward the back of the unit; there was no sight of his Cardassian friend. The smell of the shop filled his nostils: various sorts of cloth, yes, but also the subtle perfumes with which some of them were imbued during manufacture. He’d noticed that scent on Garak in the past, a faint but pleasant aroma. 

“Garak?” He moved deeper into the shop, pulling out the hypo as he went and listening carefully. Silence. That didn’t mean that Garak wasn’t there: an agent of the Obsidian Order, even one in exile and disgrace, should be able to wait or walk as quietly as a shadow. Bashir’s enhanced vision gave him slightly better perception than an average human being, but as he walked through into the back area where Garak kept most of his fabric bolts he found himself entering a place where it did him little good. 

“Doctor.” Garak’s voice, coming from behind him, surprised him. He turned, trying to pierce the dimness with his enhanced vision, and saw a shadow darker than the others standing perhaps two meters away.

“Garak! What are you —”

“I must ask you to leave.” His voice was strange. It sounded almost choked. 

“I came to see if you —”

“Now.” Soft. Dangerous. Was that a ragged edge of pain, or perhaps desperation? Echoes of another night over a year and a half ago, when death had been far too close for Bashir's comfort. "Please..."

“Will you stop interrupting me?” Bashir let his impatience color his tone of voice. “Listen, if you were here when —” 

Garak came to him, as silent as an ebony wing of the night. Bashir felt cool fingers make contact with the back of his left hand, almost tender; he felt breath ghost against his right cheek, almost a caress. Silence. But far from emptiness.

For a second he just stood there with his mouth falling open. Then he thought:  _Garak, my God..._

“Go.” A whispered command, a barely voiced sob that tore at Bashir’s heart. Across the centimeters that separated them he could taste passion, desire, perhaps even tears. “Go, dearest heart, and don’t look back.”

There were many things that Bashir might have expected to feel at a moment like this — disbelief, shock, perhaps even outrage or disgust. But none of those feelings came to him. What filled his mind instead was a memory: the dark corridor of a Dominion simulation six months past, a flash of savage radiance, and seeing this man die almost in his arms. 

He turned his hand to meet Garak’s, palm to palm, fingers entwining. He leaned forward, mingling the streams of their breaths, mammalian warmth to reptilian chill. So close that his world was filled with the Cardassian’s scent, the familiar perfume of cloth and a deeper mystery of twilight spices that seemed, for an instant, to call him home. He raised the hypo and pressed it to Garak’s neck, administering the medicine that would cure him of this fever dream that momentarily bound them together in darkness.

Then he rested his wrist on Garak’s shoulder and waited, letting himself fully feel the answering pulse of yearning in his own flesh even as he tried to forget how quickly and easily it had been awakened. A hopeless attempt. He had better-than-Human recall, but even if he hadn’t, this was the sort of memory that decades couldn’t wear smooth.

In the night that covered them he heard a sharp inhalation, the sound of sanity abruptly returning. 

“Welcome back.” He kept his tone light, trying not to think of how quickly Garak would be gone. A Human heartbeat, perhaps two. He would never permit himself such closeness when he was in his right mind.

The heartbeats came and went, and the distance that separated them suddenly vanished as Garak whispered against his mouth, like wine poured in offering upon an altar: “My dearest Doctor... I never left.”

Bashir closed his eyes, smiling in the shadows, and through the delight of that first kiss he wondered just how loudly Quark, so recently frustrated in love, would yell when he found out. 

THE END


End file.
